Sannion had a conversation with a customer about the recent mass shooting in Sandy Hook, CT, and it struck a chord with me.  (To be fair, Sannion is odd, but he says amazingly profound things often enough that I keep reading)

Me: Why do you doubt god’s existence because some kids you didn’t even know died? Thousands of people die every fucking day, many of them children. What makes these kids so special? Because a bunch of them went out together? Because their deaths are being covered on the news? Because they’re American?
Her: It’s horrible!
Me: Yeah. Every death is horrible. No death is more or less horrible than any other though, at least to the person who’s dying. We all gotta pay the price of life someday. I’m gonna die. You’re gonna die. If there was any justice in the world that bum out there would drop dead right now.

That’s an important bit, though, isn’t it? Every death is awful. Every death is sacred. We all die – it is the last great Mystery.

I suspect that’s part of why deaths of so many, especially those so young, are so hard for many of us to grapple with – the sacred is made profane this way, turned into something horrific, by someone without honor.

Somewhere else I saw someone post that she hated the admonition to go home and hug your own kids because of the death of those at Sandy Hook. Her point was that she shouldn’t have to have death to tell her to love her kids, nor should those deaths guilt her into loving her kids more. I know that when a child dies amongst the support groups I’m a part of, I do go home and hug my kids, but I do so knowing that under different circumstances, it could have been them. It’s a little bit of survivors guilt, I think.

This is the darkest of the year. The time for new beginnings. We’ve released what no longer serves us, to make room for the new and helpful things to come into our lives.  Death, though, is just a step on the road, a beginning of its own, and it’s a good time of year to consider our own mortality.

This time of year, more than any other, I’m struck by how much distance modern society tries to put between life and death.

Struck by the families who want only “non scary” costumes, or who don’t trick or treat at all. Struck by those who’ve never visited a graveyard. Struck by the deaths in our family, and those in our various circles of friends…and by the number of parents who keep their children from the funerals of those friends and family, for fear of their children’s reactions. Maurice Sendak was big on trying to get across to people that kids had all the same feelings as adults, and that things like scary stories were a good way to practice for the real word. And I think he had it right – kids are people, just like adults, with big feelings and scary experiences, and we need to offer them tools to deal with that.

One thing that’s feeling very important to me this year is the beloved dead.  I suspect that’s because of the number of folks in my various circles who have lost a loved one in recent weeks – everything from a baby girl who died on her birthday to young children dying of illness to suicides and car wrecks to the very old. The weight of those deaths weighs heavy this time of year, but for whatever reason, even more so this year.

One of the beauties of the old ways is that death is just a part of life – something that happens on the journey, not an end, but a new beginning. The stories of the seasons draw parallels to our own lives, and those can be told to children easily, because they are familiar with the seasons as a part of their world. But that also makes it easy for us to find comfort in those stories too.

The veil is thin this time of year – this year feels thinner than most. Enjoy!

This has been on my mind and on lately. There’s talk now and then online about Pagans and charity, and it came up again just recently, though I can’t for the life of me find back where it was said that Pagans aren’t charitable.

I think that’s not true…it’s just that we don’t do charity the way that Christians do.

Christians generally seem to be motivated either by evangelism  (and frankly, for many of them, even if that’s not the primary motivation it’s a secondary motivation), or by “this is what Jesus said to do.” Their relative size means there is funding available even for large scale projects, people to volunteer, and there are enough people with the right background in business and law to set up other ways for churches to make money to fund their programs (if you have any doubts there, look at sites like http://www.startchurch.com).

Since we don’t evangelize, we don’t have that as a reason to do large outreach programs We’re smaller – more localized or more specific to a certain topic. And our motivations are different. Some things we do because of specific experiences in our own lives, some because we see a need and we know we’re all in this together here on spaceship Earth, and some because a specific deity suggests to someone that the project would be a good idea.

We don’t have a lot of funding. We don’t have a large pool of volunteers to draw from. Much like our circles and groves and kindreds, our charity work is small and personal.

Circle Sanctuary has a list of bigger projects. And I know of a number of smaller projects, including one I run myself.

One problem with smaller projects is that 501(c)3 status is so expensive and time consuming to get. It makes me wonder if a bunch of us with little projects ought to band together and start a blanket non-profit with local chapters that do whatever it is that they do.

I do wonder, though, if there are other ways to do this – ways that make more sense from a Pagan standpoint. What do you think?